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Anna appears at my side. “The basement.”

In the back corner of the enormous kitchen is a plain door with a keypad. She doesn’t bother trying to decipher the code, kicking it in with enough force to splinter the frame. As soon as we’re on the stairs, the smell hits us.

Chapter 40

Ellery

Anna and Nick left a while ago, and none of us have said a word.

“Can we trust her?” I ask.

“She’s the sheriff.” Marthe slides a tray of cookies onto a wire rack. It’s the second batch since they left.

“That’s not an answer.”

“No. It’s not.” She starts spooning dough onto the next tray.

Luca has my file spread across the kitchen table, going through it yet again. He’s been quiet since Nick left, which, for Luca, is cause for concern.

“She didn’t ask anything,” he says.

“What?”

“Anna. You told her that her cousin’s been killing people, and she said okay.” He taps the page. “If somebody handed me a folder and said Nick was killing people, I’d have about six hundred questions. Starting with how dare you and ending with are you sure.”

He’s right, and I’ve been trying to untangle that whole conversation. She read it, her face went blank, and she asked me nothing at all.

A shocked person has questions. Anna didn’t ask one. Whatever she read in that file, it slotted into a picture she was already building.

“I’m missing something.” I pull up Dominic’s socials on my phone. I’ve been through these a dozen times searching for faces. I’ve been looking at the wrong thing.

Backgrounds. Curbs. Parking lots. Reflections in windows.

Fifty minutes and four cookies, and I have it.

“Luca.” I slide my phone across the table. “Whose car is that?”

It’s parked outside the Aurora Room, in the top left corner of a photo of six drunk people in Halloween costumes, clustered around a smiling Dominic. Black SUV. Windows so dark they’re virtually the same shade as the paint.

“That’s Angelo’s car.”

“Who’s Angelo?”

“Constantin’s driver.” He leans in closer to the screen. “Driver’s side fog light is cracked. I’ve replaced the glass twice, but he keeps clipping the same snowbank at the end of Constantin’s driveway.” He flicks through the other photos I’ve saved. The same car outside a whiskey bar in Anchorage. In a lot, two spaces down, half out of frame as Dominic kisses the Australian tourist in the foreground.

Marthe comes to stand behind us.

“It’s in four,” I say. “Four of the nights before somebody disappeared.”

“It could be a coincidence,” Marthe says.

Luca’s phone goes off, and we all jump.

“I asked a friend for help.” He scrolls down the screen. “She’s come through.” He hands me his phone. An email with no subject line, the sender a string of characters rather than a name, and a bunch of attachments. “Those are Ryan’s.”

Ryan Kowalski. The UAF defenseman. The guy who tried to make a buffet out of my neck.

Eleven emails. An extension request for an assignment. Flight details home for the holidays, training schedules. A job application.